One hundred years of 'La vorágine'

One memorable night long ago in Mexico City, which I have already mentioned before, we were rehearsing during the after-dinner session of a long dinner at José María Pérez Gay's house to remember the first paragraphs of novels, and Gabriel García Márquez began to recite one that everyone we chanted, Carlos Fuentes, Álvaro Mutis, because we also knew it by heart: “Before I had fallen in love with any woman, I played my heart at random, and violence won it…”, just as

La vorágine

by José Eustasio Rivera begins, one hundred years since its publication.

Born in 1888 in the town of San Mateo in the region of Los Andes, which is now called San Mateo-Rivera, civic justice for a writer, Rivera was a lawyer who worked as an official in border commissions, and that introduced him to the territories. jungles of the Amazon, where

La vorágine

mainly takes place

.

He wrote it in a red-lined accounting notebook, between April 1922 and April 1924, the year it was published in Bogotá, in the month of November.

My greatest youthful fascination with this novel, which is many things at the same time, a nature novel, an adventure novel, a social novel, was in its narrative strategy, which was consummated effectively: that well-used trick, but which never lets go. to function, in which the author pretends to be the amanuensis of another's manuscript that has come into his hands.

With a sneaky desire to deceive, the author of the novel introduces as a preamble a bureaucratic note addressed to a minister, which he signs with his real name, José Eustasio Rivera: “In accordance with the wishes of His Majesty, I have arranged for publicity the manuscripts of Arturo Cova, sent to that Ministry by the Colombian Consul in Manaus.

In those pages I respected the style and even the errors of the unfortunate writer, highlighting only the provincialisms of a more provincial nature...

Arturo Cova, poet, adventurer, has disappeared along with Alicia, the woman he had fled with, on an itinerary that takes them from the cattle plains that extend at the foot of the eastern mountain range, to the immense and intricate jungles of the Amazon.

And the pretend amanuensis recommends not publishing Arturo Cova's manuscripts “before having more news about the Colombian rubber tappers of the Río Negro or Guainía;

But if His Majesty decides otherwise, I ask you to inform me in a timely manner of the data that he acquires so that I can add them as an epilogue."

And the epilogue is: “The last cable from our Consul, addressed to the Minister and related to the fate of Arturo Cova and his companions, says verbatim: 'Five months ago you searched in vain for Clemente Silva.

No trace of them.

“The jungle devoured them!”

The impersonation scheme spans centuries, and is activated every time the appearance of truthfulness must prevail over lies.

They are the papers written in Arabic characters contained in the folders that a boy sells to a seller in the Alcaná of ​​Toledo, and that Cervantes, who happened to be there, has to translate to find that they are about the adventures of Don Quixote written not by him, but by Cide Hamete Benengeli, an Arabian historian.

Very aware of the game he plays with his readers, and enjoying it, José Eustasio Rivera included in that first edition of 1924 a photograph of Arturo Cova sitting in a hammock “in the barracks of Guaracú”, taken by the merchant Zoraida Ayram, another Of the characters;

and there is another photo of the old rubber tapper Clemente Silva, another character, the one who would search in vain for the missing in the jungle, climbing a rubber tree.

Decades before WG Sebald introduced photography in his novels as a testimony to the veracity of the invention.

In

La vorágine

the jungle becomes a character.

She is a deity who protects his inviolability, and takes revenge on those who enter his domain.

They will be annihilated by malaria and dysentery, the attack of wild beasts, the bites of vipers, and hostility among themselves.

In the end, what he lavishes is loneliness, betrayal, illness, madness, death.

Social novel, it seeks to denounce the cruelty to which the indigenous tribes of the Amazon are subjected, where only the law of the strongest prevails, at a time when natural rubber is a strategic product in world trade.

And that law was then imposed by the fearsome House Arana, which enslaved and exterminated the indigenous people in the syringales.

A complex work of fiction, it is contemporary to us due to its dual and tormented characters, a whole gallery of human beings who move between despotism and abandonment, evil and compassion, although, in the end, the jungle that swallows Arturo Cova and theirs close again on their heads.

Sergio Ramírez

is a writer and Cervantes winner.

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I am already a subscriber

_